


‘Til The Morning Comes

by CandlesInTheWell



Category: Sunless Sea
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-19
Updated: 2018-09-19
Packaged: 2019-07-14 06:11:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16034603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CandlesInTheWell/pseuds/CandlesInTheWell
Summary: Two zailors stranded in a cold world find comfort in each other.(Originally written for the prompt 100 Words of Canadian Shacks on fail-fandomanon. There’s no Canada in the ‘Neath, but there is an awful lot of frozen wasteland for people to get stuck in.)





	‘Til The Morning Comes

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Fallen London is © 2015 and ™ Failbetter Games Limited: www.fallenlondon.com.  This is an unofficial fan work. Sunless Sea is also not mine, and I make no claim to it.
> 
> I am gradually going to be archiving my FFA fic on this account, though I’m going to try not to throw everything I’ve written up here at once.

When the _Pelican’s_ captain took it into his head to map the north, they made it up to Whither uneventfully and in good time. They didn’t make it much farther.

The Reverent Engineer would later blame a shrine destroyed, a god denied; she would claim she should have known it was foolish to sign on with a captain who followed no god but the Church’s. The Unsmiling Gunner thought it was nothing but terrible luck.

Whatever it was, it came in the form of a mountain of glittering, faceted ice, rising from the fog with uncanny speed and something that looked too much like purpose. The Gunner remembered the scream of ice on metal, the black water rushing in through the rent in the hull, and the other screams too, the silence after. She remembered pulling the Engineer from the water, waves slopping over the side of her flimsy piece of flotsam as it tilted beneath the new weight, and the hours or days in the zee-dark after with only a small glim-lamp between them – and at last, numb and fragmentary, the Engineer muttering a salt prayer as they stumbled up a barren beach, past jagged familiar shapes toward the ice-rimed rocks.

And it was luck or the action of currents, the Gunner knew, and not the intervention of Salt or Storm or any other bloody zee spirit, that they had landed where they did instead of drifting further into the dark. But knowing wasn’t enough to stop her from offering thanks to _something_ when she saw there was a shack in the shelter of the cliffs, cold and dark but more welcoming in that moment than the finest inn.

It was clear long before they reached it that the place was uninhabited. The door swung loose and the threshold was buried under ‘Neath-snow – but the walls were sturdy enough for something made of driftwood, and no one there meant no one to turn them away. As for who had built it... there was had a bed in the corner, covered in moldering blankets and inhabited by a grinning skeleton; this far from the Mountain’s light, death came quick and tended towards permanence. No supplies – that fragment of hope died quickly – but at least the empty crates caught fire quick and burned hot. With a blanket stuffed beneath the door for insulation, the single room was small enough to heat quickly. They stripped off their wet clothes to dry, too weary and desperate for warmth to mind about shyness, and sat shoulder to shoulder before the fire, not talking about what might have happened to the person who had built this place and never left it. That night they slept hungry, on the floor in each other’s arms as the embers burned low, and they woke up shivering.

When morning came – or when sleep ended, at least, for there was no way of knowing here – they went back to the beach to see what they had left there in the search for shelter. What their light illumined was a graveyard of rotting spars, rusted machinery and salt-corroded metal. Other ships had been broken here, it seemed, dashed against the cliffs or brought low by the same animate ice that had sent their vessel to the deeps. The Gunner didn’t know whether to find that heartening or not. 

She turned to the Engineer, who had been hanging back to examine what looked like it had been an engine once, and asked, “Are any of these fixable?”

“I don’t know,” the Engineer said. “With time, maybe.”

The Gunner looked at the skeletons of ships around her, thinking of the empty supply crates and their friend on the bed, wondering how much time they had. There was no point in letting herself speculate, but when she started to walk on, the Engineer caught the her by the wrist. Her hand was tense, trembling a little with cold or hunger, and she looked paler than usual in the feeble glow of their lantern. 

“Listen,” she said. “If it has to be one of us who makes it off this rock, I want it to be you.”

“I don’t know what you’re on about,” the Gunner said, tugging her arm away roughly.

“Yes, you do. And if it comes to it.... I don’t want it to, but if it does – ”

“What?”

“There are other gods than Salt.”

The Gunner might not have been a Whither-born mystic, but she had been at zee long enough to hear those words and know their meaning, and though the weather didn’t change, she felt suddenly that much colder.

“I don’t hold with gods,” she snapped. “Any of them. And if you die first, the only thing it will come to is a decent cremation.”

The Engineer nodded, neither arguing nor conceding, and the Gunner knew this was the last they’d speak of it. If they were lucky, the last they’d think of it either. There was life still, even this far north – fish, crabs, even zee-bats white as a surface winter; with luck, some of it would be here, and edible.

The Gunner spent her next hours whittling a broken-off piece of wood into a spear, and later, half-frozen and dizzy from hunger, peering into still pools sheltered by the rocks and searching for a flash of motion. For too long, there was nothing. Then – _there_ – silver-quick, caught by glim-light on the water. Her spear plunged, struck, rose again from the water with an eyeless fish skewered on the end, large enough for a meal in itself. She lifted it in triumph, and seeing the Engineer watching intently from her perch on a nearby rock, she felt a wave of hard satisfaction: _Your gods don’t win the day yet._

That night, there was white fish roasted over a spitting driftwood fire, and when the Engineer spoke, it was of no gods at all, only salvage. Perhaps there was something of use amid all the wreckage on the shore, enough at least to scavenge and rebuild. The Gunner wasn’t sure she believed it, but she was damned sure she wasn’t going to say anything to steal the hope from the Engineer’s voice when she had none of her own to offer. Instead, she told a joke – one she’d heard in Gaider’s Mourn involving the Bishop of Saint Fiacre’s and an exceptionally improper use for all those candles. The Engineer fired back with one about a duke, a dog, and a drownie that made hers seem innocent by comparison, and that was all it took to steer the conversation back to safe waters.

They bathed in ice-melt when the meal was done, heated over the fire in an iron pot the Engineer had dragged up from the beach. The Gunner was awake enough now, with her belly full and her mind clear, that she felt the need to avert her eyes as the Engineer stepped out of salt-stiff trousers and knelt to wash herself – but turning away was not enough to forget that she had spent the night before with her head resting on the Engineer’s scarred shoulder, holding her pale and bruised as lacre piled up outside the door, or to shake off the ghostly feeling of thin fingers closing around her wrist, or that terrible offer. She closed her eyes, reminding herself that she had no use for sentiment and less for sacrifice; when she opened them, the Engineer was crouching in front of her, too close and too clear-sighted for comfort.

She had never been able to guess what kind of desires that woman kept tucked away behind her devotions, if any at all. She’d been a mystery the Gunner had never cared to solve, wrapped up in superstitions that had annoyed and unnerved her in equal measure. Now all of that seemed insignificant against the memory of warmth in a world of cold, and the feeling of another person curled close beneath a single blanket – human, alive, and too full of the fragility that came with both those things. You couldn’t survive some things together and still be strangers. The Gunner reached out, and found herself met halfway, pulled in and down into an open-mouthed kiss. The Engineer’s skin tasted of what might have been mistaken for zee-water, if she hadn’t been fresh from bathing, but now could only be tears; her fingers dug into the Gunner’s shoulders, and neither of them let go for a long time.

They slept again beneath a single blanket, and what the Gunner remembered of that night was wordless, a story written in heat and salt: holding the Engineer from behind, with a thigh pressed up between her legs and a hand on her stomach, tracing the edges of an old burn scar; the Engineer’s fingers closing over hers and urging them down past more scars, through rough curls, to press up into the warmth of her cunt. She was slick already, wet and open to the Gunner’s touch, and her breath when she exhaled carried a word of prayer and a ragged edge of desperation. 

“Please,” she gasped, rocking back against the Gunner’s thigh, and, “damn you, gods take you, zee keep you,” a thousand other curses and blessings, and it seemed to the Gunner that there in the dark as the fire burned low, all of them translated to _don’t let me be alone_. She had no more truck with promises than she did with gods, and all she had by way of answer was her hand between the Engineer’s legs and a kiss on the nape of her neck, this rough reminder that they weren’t dead yet. But it seemed to her then, untouched and aching, and later with her own breath coming harsh and the Engineer’s mouth hot against the inside of her thigh, that no other answers were needed. 

When she slept at last, it was with the ease of satisfied exhaustion, the weight of another in her arms and no dreams to trouble her. When she woke, it was to a roaring fire and the smell of cooking fish. The Engineer was watching her with a tranquility belied by the slight flush in her cheeks, and the sight of her left the Gunner afflicted with a renewed pang of shyness and desire. Time for that later. Nothing here to do but that and the work of survival, but survival came first.

“The engines are mostly useless,” the Engineer said, “and even if they weren’t, I don’t think a one of those wrecks is seaworthy. I went looking while you slept. But there’s something I should show you.”

So they made their way down to the beach again, into the cold with flecks of lacre drifting on a wind from the north. The Gunner shivered, but the Engineer knew where she was going, and led the way to one wreck among many.

“This,” she said, patting a prow-light from some now-nameless steamer. “This I can fix.”

“A light?”

The Engineer grinned. “A beacon. I need a boiler. I need fuel. And I need to get it up there.”

There was wood aplenty, at least, and the Gunner thought she might have seen a boiler with minimal damage. If anything, hauling the blasted things up the cliff would be the hardest part. And then – a light like that would cut through the night of the ‘Neath, powerful enough to catch the eye of any passing ship. For the first time, the Gunner began to hope they’d make it out alive. No certainties yet, but...

“How long?” she asked.

“Three days, maybe,” the Engineer said, “if all goes well.”

“Does it ever?” the Gunner said, but as she said it, she felt the Engineer take her hand and squeeze it tightly, and it occurred to her that _no certainties_ was a truth that cut both ways. They might die yet. They might make it home safe with a tale or two fit to terrify children. But whatever black water they’d be crossing, they’d cross it side by side – and, she promised herself, grinning wide enough to give the lie to her title, any gods who felt like standing in their way had best get out of it.


End file.
